Tag Archives: New Persian Literatur

The second volume of the Handbook of Iranian Studies follows the concept of the first volume and develops it further. It follows the division of the first volume (for the first Volume see here) into eight discipline-defined sections and completes the research overview of the first volume in a comprehensive way with about 50 articles. Thus, in the second part, the few gaps of the first volume are closed in eight sections, and the “Iranian Philosophy and Sciences” are added in a ninth section. The view is also directed increasingly at the geographical periphery of the Iranian world. Several articles deal with the history, culture and present of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kurdistan and other regions. The second volume of the handbook of Iranian Studies, in addition to the first volume, also provides research reports. In the second volume, specialized research reports on certain areas are added in the second volume, such as “Persian Literature”: Contributions to Iranian exile and travel literature, current innovative topics such as gender, bio-ethics, the Internet and new media.

Nasrin Askari explores the medieval reception of Firdausī’s Shāhnāma, or Book of Kings (completed in 1010 CE) as a mirror for princes. Through her examination of a wide range of medieval sources, Askari demonstrates that Firdausī’s oeuvre was primarily understood as a book of wisdom and advice for kings and courtly elites. In order to illustrate the ways in which the Shāhnāma functions as a mirror for princes, Askari analyses the account about Ardashīr, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, as an ideal king in the Shāhnāma. Within this context, she explains why the idea of the union of kingship and religion, a major topic in almost all medieval Persian mirrors for princes, has often been attributed to Ardashīr.

Nasrin Askari, PhD, (2012), University of Toronto, has completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia, and will be working on her next project at the University of Oxford as a Bahari Visiting Scholar in the Persian Arts of the Book.

The Textbook Modern Persian contains thirty selected readings about contemporary Iran from various disciplinary perspectives including: literature, philosophy, theology, mysticism, society, politics, history, geography, sports, cuisine, mythology and computational linguistics. Each chapter of the book includes an introduction to the topic, a rating of the complexity of the text (from A2 to C2 according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), the philological acquisition of lexical fields within the chapter, and a selected bibliography of additional material on the subject matter. The text also includes a concise trilingual glossary (Persian-German-English), a conjugation sample, a detailed list of all common infinitives in Modern Persian, and English abstracts for each of the thirty textbook units. This book is ideal for students taking Persian language courses, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary Persian language, literature and culture.

For more information read the preface to this volume and a sample chapter as well as see the ToC.
About the author:Farshid Delshad received his PhD in Historical Comparative Linguistics from the German University of Friedrich-Schiller. He is currently working in Germany and in the United States as an associate scholar for Languages and Cultures of the Muslim World.